Pages

Saturday, 15 April 2017

Android ConstraintLayout

To use android
ConstraintLayout, make sure you’re using the latest Android Studio version.
Ideally, Android Studio 2.2 and above. We need to download the necessary SDK
Tools for ConstraintLayout from the SDK Manager.

Create
a new empty activity project and add the following dependency inside thebuild.gradlefile.

To convert an old layout into a ConstraintLayout. Open the
design pane of the respective layout, right click the root component and choose
the relevant optionas Convert
RelativeLayout to ConstraintLayout

Android Constraint Layout
Overview

Android
ConstraintLayout is used to define a layout by assigning constraints for every
child view/widget relative to other views present.

A
ConstraintLayout is similar to a RelativeLayout, but with more power. The aim
of ConstraintLayout is to improve the performance of the applications by
removing the nested views with a flat and flexible design.

A view inside
the ConstraintLayout has handles(or anchor points) on each side which are used
to assign the constraints. Let’s drag and drop a TextView on the layout and
assign the constraints to it.

The TextView above has
three types of handles:

Resize handle– It’s present on the four corners and is
used to resize the view, but keeping its constraints intact.

Side handle – It’s the circular handle present on the centre of each
side. It’s used to set the top, left, bottom and right constraints of the view.

Baseline handle – It’s used to align the baseline with
another textview in the layout.